Alliance to challenge EU herbal law - Health Supreme NewsGrabs Wednesday, 23 March 2010

Health Alliance weighs challenge against EU herb law

An expert’s workshop in Budapest, sponsored by the Indian government and convened by the European Ayurvedic Association, provided the venue for the Alliance for Natural Health to announce its intention to initiate legal proceedings against the European Directive on Traditional Herbal Medicinal Products.

Milk thistle - by Sepp

The directive poses a major obstacle for the continued use and practice of long-standing traditions of healthcare involving herbal products in Europe, including those of Ayurveda and Unani from the Indian sub-continent and that of traditional Chinese medicine.

Alliance director Dr Robert Verkerk: "Given the challenges facing the health of the people of Europe, especially as a result of the burden of chronic diseases, the EU should be welcoming—not locking out—these very long-standing, multi-faceted and effective healthcare traditions. We are now assured that a diverse range of interests are willing to work with us to initiate the judicial review process."

The EU herbal law does not consider the major herbal traditions. It was made specifically to save German herbal medicine from extinction under the EU medicines laws, which the UK, at the time, demanded to be applied to all medicines, including traditional herbs. Pharmaceutical lobbying to ensure herbs could not compete with chemical medicines only made things worse.

Wrong problem ... wrong solution. So now we are stuck with a law that is an obstacle to herbal medicines, rather than enabling their use and the need to go to court and try to resolve the matter. What we are paying those EU legislators for...

The Wonder of Cholesterol
When you are tempted to reduce your cholesterol levels, why not ask a question which is fundamental to your health. “What does cholesterol do and why do we make and store so much of it in all the cells of your body?” The answer is astonishingly simple: all our cells and cell membranes need it to function properly

There has never been a scientific study that has been able to demonstrate a causal link between cholesterol and heart disease. The reality is that cholesterol in its natural form cannot be harmful. Cholesterol is irrelevant to atherosclerosis. Far from being harmful, cholesterol ranks highly among the most important biochemicals in our bodies.

Video: The Real Story on Vitamin D
You can get it from the sun, from a pill or in your food, and it can save your life...

Junk Food Nearly as Addictive as Heroin
The researchers fed rats one of three diets: a nutritious diet, a healthy diet with restricted access to junk food, or a diet of unlimited junk food. Junk foods included cheesecake, chocolate, sponge cake and fatty meat. Mice in the third group quickly became obese, while the weight of mice in the first two groups did not change.

The researchers then began exposing rats to painful electric shocks whenever they ate junk food. The rats on the restricted junk food diet quickly stopped eating the food, but the binge-eating rats were undeterred.

"You lose control. It's the hallmark of addiction," researcher Paul Kenny said.

Bangladeshi scientist dismisses GM foods as no food at all
Genetically Modified foods or crops should not be classified as food at all, as they are liable to cause various health problems affecting the liver and kidney, and hence unfit for human consumption. Dr Mohammed Ataur Rahman, a veteran Bangladeshi agriculturist, made this assertion to newsmen Saturday in his office at the International University of Business Agriculture and Technology in Dhaka, where he is Director of the Centre for Global Environmental Culture, as well as the Program on Education for Sustainability.

He mentioned that a legal challenge issued against Monsanto had forced the multinational agricultural giant to release raw data revealing that animals fed its patented GM corn suffered liver and kidney damage within just three months.

“Genetically manipulated food crops are not fit for human consumption and should not be classified as food. No legitimate study has ever proven them to be safe or nutritious.”

USA - Thinking Outside the Box: Re-Design our Health Care System
May 27-30, 2010 - Olympia, Washington
The aim of this working conference is to seed designs of a variety of local projects that move the health care system away from the corporate-business context into models of compassion and service. We'll show current innovations in health care system design that can be replicated back home, as well as teach concepts and ideas that enable you to build your own.

Corporte Concern Over Berkeley Scientist’s Herbicide Studies
The study was conducted by Tyrone Hayes, a professor of Integrative Biology, and found that feeding atrazine to tadpoles reshaped their sexuality as they grew to adults. Ten percent of the 80 males he tested for the study had become anatomically female and capable of mating with other males, while three-fourths of the remainder were sterile, The San Francisco Chronicle reported last week.

"This paper that we published is — to give you a teaser — nothing. It’s the tip of the iceberg. These are the first two papers of a dozen papers that are long-term looking in incredible depth and detail at the long-term effects of atrazine. We’re looking at homosexuality in frogs, we’re looking at breast cancer, we’re looking at endocrine mechanisms across vertebrates, from fish all the way up to humans."

Book Review: The Fluoride Deception by Christopher Bryson
"... one is left with the question, how on earth and why would such a terrible idea of adulterating the water supply with a dangerous substance not only become entrenched but loudly proclaimed as a public health victory, it all seems too unbelievable. What the Fluoride Deception adds is the necessary historical context to make sense of the debate. From pointing out the tremendous risk of litigation industry previously faced from fluoride related injuries to documenting the crucial role fluoride plays in the aluminum industry, pharmaceutical industry and consumer products one can begin to understand the motivation for declaring fluoride harmless.

When one also remembers that uranium hexafluoride is essential to enriching uranium and thus litigation could interfere both with the nuclear power industry as well as the production of nuclear weapons one again sees why any criticism of fluoride has been squelched with all the available tools of public relations, propaganda and censorship for over half a century."

Many Avandia defenders have drug company ties
A team at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, pored through more than 200 scientific studies and commentaries that offered positive opinions about the drug after a May 2007 study suggested Avandia significantly increased the risk of heart attacks.

They found that 94 percent of the authors who defended the drug, known generically as rosiglitazone, had ties to drug companies, and nearly half had financial ties that presented a conflict of interest.

Saudi Arabia Suspends Avandia Diabetes Pill
“Based on growing evidence from clinical trials meta-analyses and observational studies indicating serious cardiovascular adverse events associated with the use of rosiglitazone (Avandia), the Advisory Committee for Pharmacovigilance in Saudi Arabia has concluded…the risk of using (Avandia) outweighs its benefit especially risks of cardiovascular events including myocardial infarction and congestive heart failure in addition to increased risk of fractures, and safer alternatives could be used.”

When drug makers' profits outweigh penalties
Prosecutor Michael Loucks remembers clearly when attorneys for Pfizer, the world's largest drug company, looked across the table and promised it wouldn't break the law again.

It was January 2004, and the lawyers were negotiating in a conference room on the ninth floor of the federal courthouse in Boston, where Loucks was head of the health-care fraud unit of the U.S. Attorney's Office. One of Pfizer's units had been pushing doctors to prescribe an epilepsy drug called Neurontin for uses the Food and Drug Administration had never approved.

In the agreement the lawyers eventually hammered out, the Pfizer unit, Warner-Lambert, pleaded guilty to two felony counts of marketing a drug for unapproved uses. New York-based Pfizer agreed to pay $430 million in criminal fines and civil penalties, and the company's lawyers assured Loucks and three other prosecutors that Pfizer and its units would stop promoting drugs for unauthorized purposes.

What Loucks, who was acting U.S. attorney in Boston until November, didn't know until years later was that Pfizer managers were breaking that pledge not to practice off-label marketing even before the ink was dry on their plea.

Somehow our justice system does not have appropriate penalties for corporations. They just go on doing the same things and worse. Penalties assessed by the courts become a normal cost of doing business.

Death penalty for corporations, anyone?

HIV/Aids: to the soil we shall return
Geographical disease pattern analogies suggest that HIV/AIDS is rife in regions with selenium depleted soils. Adults and children with advanced AIDS syndrome display both highly depleted selenium plasma stores and reduced CD4 Cell counts. The fall in selenium levels triggers the reduction in CD4 cells, which in turn causes further decline in serum selenium. This phenomenon is now being called "the selenium CD4 T-cell tailspin".

HIV depresses selenium levels in the host. This allows the virus to replicate indefinitely by continuously depriving the host of glutathione, an inhibitor of reverse transcriptase.

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The Dr Rath Foundation campaigns for a New Healthcare System.
Natural health and nutrition on La Leva di Archimede
Food, Agriculture and more on the Organic Consumers Association site.

"The individual is supreme and finds its way through intuition"

 

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posted by Sepp Hasslberger on Tuesday March 23 2010
updated on Monday November 22 2010

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